i'm. a lawyer john harwood of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture why republicans so worried about the united nations taking over our government and if they really think of defunct nonprofit group help steal the election for president obama all that more in tonight's lone liberal rumble and thousands of men women and children die every year as a result of senseless and completely preventable gun violence but have we become a nation that's afraid to talk about guns and to create the laws that are needed to effectively regulate that will protect american lives.

you need to know this paranoid delusions swept the floor of the united states senate on tuesday as a group of republican senators blocked ratification of a u.n. treaty to help disabled people around the planet the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities requires signatory u.n. nations to provide for disabled populations in the exact same way as does the american one nine hundred ninety americans with disabilities act the treaty would require absolutely no changes to current u.s. law suite already passed the american americans with disabilities act more than twenty years ago it simply calls on other nations to adopt these same american standards. standards that were signed in place by president george w.

bush in two thousand and six and then resigned by president obama in two thousand and nine this was championed by former republican senator bob dole himself disabled who was wheeled onto the senate floor for the vote and witnessed senator kerry's passionate speech. what we do here in the united states senate matters not just to us but to people all across the globe and maybe some people here need to be reminded of that please don't let captain brzezinski down don't let senator bob dole down most importantly don't let the senate and the country down approve this treaty. the treaty was also supported by republicans john mccain dick lugar and john barrasso receive sixty one votes in the senate a clear majority are over treaty ratification requires a two thirds majority sixty six votes and thirty eight republicans including senators jim de mint mike lee and marco rubio joined together to block it out of fear that it threatens the sovereignty of the united states even though again the

treaty would require no changes to u.s. laws since our nation already passed laws to assist the disabled on which this treaty is based rather than doing what's right for the nation in the entire world republicans in the senate use this treaty to scare the hell out of their base and warn of a nameless faceless global un that they say is trying to take over the united states nothing could be further from the truth and even more ironic is that these same republican support free trade agreements like nafta and the trans-pacific partnership which actually do threaten our sovereignty on behalf of transnational corporations the time for some sanity in the united states. now it's turned over to our lower liberal rubble. it's was are you ready to rumble join you for tonight's long liberal rumble are

francesca chambers editor and publisher at red alert politics and neil munro white house correspondent for the daily caller thank you both for being here let's get right into this why are republicans worried about you know i understand the one world threat i understand the loss of sovereignty i mean my my father was all upset about the u.n. they're coming to get us and the republicans but they actually are coming to get us i mean we've passed after twenty five years effort we passed a law the dolphin safe tuna law it was this is championed by the humane society of america and it got knocked down a law that we passed by a mexican corporation under nafta is why are conservatives not just crazy about nafta and the transpacific birth rates of all he said this is something that republicans are purposefully using to scare the base that's not true at all i'm someone who's obviously very familiar with the base is talking about that's what my work is revolved around and i've had not even heard about this before today and this is not something that republicans are talking about you know which is not something that well i don't spend my whole entire day watching fox news since i'm

a reporter i actually try to report the news but the the thing is this is not something that that members are sending out letters on and trying to get the base right of way then why does not this yanking this into a my group you know then this is that all too well here's the ok here's my question and neil why are republicans you know if they're genuinely concerned about american sovereignty instead of voting down a treaty that simply says the rest of the world should do what we've been doing for twenty years why don't they take. the you nafta and and put you know put a stake into the heart of this transpacific partnership before it rises in part because republicans have a nuanced moderate middle ground approach these. complex questions and i recognize that there's room for inconsistency and all sorts of special interest in this however that the senate's rejection of the disability makes complete sense if united states with more freedom to govern itself i'm an immigrant i came to this country not to live in this country under this country not to live under

a ward of the united nations is a country a special and inhuman so even for a simple you're opposed to treaties because they supersede the law the way i can understand that and i'm sure you know the same reason why i'm against it as well it's not specifically about this treaty or what this tree does it's about the subject i understand and government and you know goes back to the don't be governed don't don't you guys think in this context and i don't actually disagree with you you know that the united states should decide and i think we should be very careful study treaties because treaties supersede the law of the way i think they are we could cite a treaty with canada that says whenever somebody what's a canadian food the kurds everybody in america has to salute or become the law the law means so but what happened to america being an example of what happened to america being a leader of all the trouble of the american with disabilities twenty years ago. you and i and she and the west we all sing kumbaya and preserving american democracy at

the same time one things don't care about the leadership fair enough i think the one thing to watch out for these treaties is often their jobs programs for the professional task creating jobs for lawyers at this is not an effect on her i don't know those who have the law that we should be decent about this and remember that there are foreigners who can be damaged by these thoughts and we want the freedom to adjust our laws so you're saying if a company in mumbai doesn't want to cut accommodate disabled people that we shouldn't inflict our values on them yes and no one must be careful if you we are to enjoy our independence they should enjoy depends too and absolutely yes there are limits which we'll argue about better i don't get that that's that's not a rational argument francesca why is there not. a similar outcry on the right about these traitors ino and it's kind of like what he said before there are inconsistent these with their political philosophy with their idiology just as there are inconsistent these on the i think there is a terribly consistent because what neil is saying is let's not mess with foreign corporations we don't want to hurt their profitability and what these trade deals

do is they help foreign corporations in both cases average working people get screwed but this is let's help the corporations no i spent some very major conflict in consistencies in the sense of that you know they support the trade agreements but they don't support the sovereignty issue in this specific case but the great agreements are a surrender of sovereignty and in that case i do believe that if the public if you believe that if other republicans believe that then you should know if they then they should be against them and so i'm saying there's inconsistency than the the idiology unfortunately but i but i do agree with what you had to say about you know it could have unintended consequences on the other countries some laws that we do have that they don't have to help protect oh i'm not you know i'm not going to go to the mat on that i mean i don't i understand that and i understand and sort of the founders that's why it takes a super majority to pass a treaty you know but i just anyway we've done this to death i think harry reid says he wants to reform the filibuster he once again promised to do it he asked republicans to work with him on it speak to reporters on tuesday reid said we're

going to change the rules we can't continue this way i hope we can get something with the republicans it will work on this and he and jeff merkley are spearheading this effort to say that if you're going to filibuster you have to stand there and talk and just you know look at this chart shows how many record breaking filibusters we've seen since here it is there's filibusters since what's the year it doesn't say here in my copy but since nine hundred sixty one ok and and then you know democrats come into office of bohem the filibusters explode also it forty republican senators who are typically leading filibusters represent only eleven percent of americans. so there you go there from like little states like wyoming and oklahoma and and so to do with this one why should i have an percent of americans be determining the agenda of one hundred percent of those the senate was created for isn't all there is to dave to be able to have a voice that they wouldn't necessarily have now shut down everybody else you know

we're not going to play your cards you may want to minorities you know liberal or progressive trampling over the rights of minority i mean machine the constitution says that when the sun passes something by a fifty percent majority fifty plus one fifty one percent majority if it's a lawful way to filibuster is done because you can sort of overdone but bear in mind we're having more filibusters now because politics are moving into cultural issues where the fed chief the progressive for the federal government are trying to impose their views on every corner and of this country if they tried to do that of course they're going to get more filibusters and by the way there's an easy way to get the democrats to change their mind and filibusters who vote republican majority and you will instantly see both sides switch but there's a difference when democrats and go back to the one nine hundred sixty s. when democrats filibuster every single time they have been representing more than fifty percent of americans fifty one republicans filibuster every single time they've been representing fewer than twenty five when the democrats were filibustering they were filibustering equal opportunity for african-americans and

yes times change and so now they objected not about was in the fifty's i'm talking about since this has and your point about the percentage of population is true but as you know we have a legal system constitution and it was set up like this and if the democrats know what the filibuster is not the constitution the constitution was set up so that the states with less people in it would be equally represented in the senate where you could vote majority but the point being that you're saying that the you know the senate only these states only make up eleven percent of the population and you're using that as part of yours are you starters and you're using that as part of your argument for why this is a terrible idea that's completely irrelevant that the constitution was set up to protect the minority as as the filibuster is not the constitution. they're afraid of the bigger point but here's the bigger point which is that when democrats were in power they supported the filibuster harry reid isn't completely hypocritical on this issue you know going back to two thousand and five when the democrats you know were not in power he was very much in favor of it he wrote all kinds of reasons on

how he was in favor of it but now they were not what they were babies as it was when he was going to slow them down to these very critical is not hypocritical and i never meant it in the first place and he doesn't want it now and i want to go after a majority and by the way there's again this probably the republicans conserves would agree to a fair trade majority rule senator from majority rule in the courts namely no more supreme court vetoes over democratic decisions on lifestyles relates to sex and marriage why do i think this should be supreme court over any laws at all of the team if he was you and he is not in the constitution so you would limit the courts if you do we change our laws yes i would go back to the way it was pretty eighty three another shocking outbreak of disagreement what agreement do you agree with that you think it is or do is i don't want to be you'll be abraham lincoln and thomas jefferson we've written down the courts probably overreach of amazing amazing and f.d.r. also. get more of a loan liberal rubble coming up right after this break. here's

mitt romney trying to figure out. of that thing that the americans call adult. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot of what you say are you know what that is my other terror cells you know want to listen to features in the olympics and the first place just. to be able to look at the. you know the corporate media to structures from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven in this. three that's. garbage he calls it breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realize everything. i'm tom hardy welcome to the big picture.

what about the lone liberal rumble joining me tonight are francesca chambers and neil munro let's get back to it we're going to come and you're going to come on sometime neal and we'll just have a whole conversation about you to share with you but right now what the heck is going on with republicans a new poll by public holding signs that forty nine percent of republicans registered republicans nearly half believe that acorn stole the election last month for president obama acorn doesn't exist they closed down in two thousand and ten after congress stripped funding after a smear job by james o'keefe so and in addition that the same public poll found that a. order of registered republicans want to secede from the union we're going to go to the libertarian paradise of somalia peoples republic of some piece of back sicko i mean what i want you guys a barrister for your party and we recognize the phone diversity of american people

after every election there's a shop remember all the hollywood guys who lied to us about leaving the country after bush one we're still waiting to hear them exit the two or three of them and so the but this is one in five percent of the entire party but you also get crazy polls a lot of polls where people say i really don't like what happened i want to think of a reason to blame it so in this case when you ask people who are on happy about obama's victory they blame what they can we've seen democrats do this back during the iraq campaign nineteen percent of democrats were so angry that bush they said they wanted that you had these to win and in fact yes no no no no the box may have taken their poll but i don't believe the democrats actually said yes we want the elevator with only about one thousand percent and let's say twenty five. zero ok but here are the crazy people have always been the one gascoyne is the point there are crazy people on both sides a quarter of your party but here's the thing it's having a party i think that most americans on either side are generally uninformed about

the issues and uninformed about what's going on if you look at some of the polls that were taken before the election some of the studies that were done there were some really fantastic ones where they would go and they would ask people about obama's stance on the issues but then they would say that those were romney's stances on the issues and obama supporters would say yeah that was a really terrible idea as you know one of them was about drones and all this korea got a lot of times i agree right but then once they revealed that it was obama's views in the people were like oh well you know obama can get a pass oh so i think there's been plenty of studies to show just the fact that on either side most people really don't understand what they're talking about on this you know i don't i don't entirely disagree with. but one of the things that came out of the public policy poll that was most fascinating was that when they asked people if they thought the simpson bowles was a good idea thirty nine percent of americans said yes and then they create this this thing it was because bowles was never elected to anything he was just a clinton staffer fact he got knocked down twice and twice he was defeated i don't

know why these guys represent anybody but anyhow they said panetta burns because leon panetta used to be a clinton staffer and burns was a republican senator westerners a republican senator so they said well what do you think of the panetta burns strategy twenty five percent of americans support that thirty nine percent support simpson bowles doesn't this tell us something about the whole lane and americans are and how they want to agree with that nice fellow who's asking the question you think you think that was i want to look smart i think if the issue is that they want to look smart they want to look like they're in the know yes i can remember going there is nothing about this a lot of people are busy raising kids watching t.v. working and they want to participate in politics and they go no i can't agree with you and as a result of thirty five years or greater nomics both people the family are working they're having to work six jobs between the two of them yeah you know i'm totally with you but what how should this inform us those of us who are having public policy debates and in particular the people just a few blocks from here who are actually making the laws when they look at polls and

they make decisions based on those polls when the polls might be just like crazy stuff and they're reasonably aware that many times the polls are crazy but let's not restrict ourselves to ordinary americans let's look at washington and washington believe for example you can manage the nation's health care system and the world's weather well i think they're kind of crazy but we've got degrees and television shows so nobody says a lot about us all right longshoreman the los angeles port workers are declaring a victory today this was after an eight day long strike which ended last night the strike began last month when the international longshoremen and warehouse union's local clerical workers these were jobs that were to be outsourced to india walked out of the board. that their jobs might be outsourced to india more than ten thousand doctors refused to cross the picket lines which closed down out of the ports fourteen terminals slowing the delivery of billions of dollars of cargo and threatening corporate america's profits which you know you just can't have shippers of the port of promising that the clerical workers are going to keep their jobs

they're not going to outsource them isn't this a great model for americans to say you know we want to keep our jobs here what evidence do you have that they were going to ship them overseas that was not the case at all they there was no evidence to support the idea they were going to ship them overseas they were simply afraid that their jobs might be outsourced overseas it was completely unfounded fear there was no evidence to support that and as a result then they were forced because i mean because i was reading about it earlier today that actually is a multiple article where you're saying that people who put their jobs on the line did so because they had a paranoid fantasy didn't put their jobs on the line they did when their jobs and when you are cowed you absolutely are putting your job on the line particular if not for the record you know when you're caught in a strike and people are refusing to cross the picket lines and all that good president reagan honestly there was no evidence to support the fact that their jobs were going to be shipped overseas that was just something that they were concerned about let's let's say for a moment that there actually was ok isn't some sort of

a strike action i mean we just saw this last week in new york with the with the workers of a dollar you know hey you know seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour you know the average every page of workers in the fast food industry new york city is twenty eight times the percentage of that sixteen year old i'm sympathetic to the wal-mart strikes i'm sympathetic to some sort of a mcdonald's strike where the issue is wages they're not being paid as much as they should be that i'm very sympathetic to having you know obviously worked at a target or you know all that stuff growing up as well and trying to make ends meet when i was in college very sympathetic to a straight based on treatment and wages who have been thrown out of your party i'm sympathetic to that i'm not saying that i support it one hundred percent i'm saying i'm sympathetic to a strike based on those reasons but for something. that they don't even know is happening might not even happen and could be shipped overseas you know that that is something that i'm not sympathetic with for that reason but then it's a larger point this is a vast and complex economy these are highly productive workers you can see the cranes you can see the containers we can afford small blocks of inefficiency

because it makes americans more earn more money they live a better life but this is an argument for having a high tech highly productive country not a country based on low skill labor as we have now with immigration policy on low skilled labor based on the terrible schools and we can manage a broad based terrible education reva bhalla see that moves all of that is that for so many of. the maybe don't fix to the question of international trade we can modify a fix we just says you know this is george bush said you know we don't need no strings a.b.m. treaty the president can say we don't need no stinking trade treaty yes he could and that would cost enormous numbers of jobs in certain sectors no. millions of jobs and it would create millions of jobs however we would also and up driving up prices we would be we would have more jobs but we would all be poorer there may be a better one to do it we would have more jobs and we would all be richer used to be

richer than we are now ages were higher he was a dancer and we restrict the supply of labor and increase productivity so like at the end of you in return you drive up wages well you can restrict the supply of labor you know and historically that's been done but the easiest way to restrict the supply of labor is to make sure that the demand for labor is greater than supply of labor and you do that by bringing those factor we've lost fifty thousand factories in the last ten years bring those factories back here have a labor shortage what's it going to do it's going to drive wages that wages go up people going to more some more disposable income is going to stimulate the economy the country grows it happened from the one nine hundred forty s. until the one nine hundred eighty s. and then reaganomics came along and for thirty two years we've seen this got drive going to do that you have to make the you have to make a policy decision that you would. the supply of labor otherwise bringing more factories in would just bring in more workers from around the world so if you both of you mean enforce immigration laws actually enforce the law oh yeah you know you could argue the point you're competing with we don't want to go on to this debate here for just all it's obviously all reagan's fault so yeah you know they're only i

don't want to you know i started with. the only other thing i want to do you know get on the story because i would be sympathetic if it were for for other reasons but those weren't the reasons and now it's being what's happening because of this is that those those ports are being held hostage to the point where now that the agreement includes these workers being given tenure there for the rest of their life and that stops them from being able to get rid of people if they don't need as many workers if there's technology that comes along with the fast and it was no zero point zero we're talking about forty or fifty people but are we being to the point being that now they cannot fire those people because those people have jobs for life want to basically i really want you to tell your sister they can fire them the agreement was that they wouldn't send their jobs to india you know the agreement was that they would give them jobs for the rest of their life they have tenure there for the rest of the life now that was what was part of their agreement you know it's not i'm sorry but our problems of hurricane sandy thirty thousand people are still without power twenty one hundred families are still on the most distance sixty seven hundred billions in new york city are still at the moment

still need work to be habitable the president is calling in his fiscal cliff negotiations for some stimulus spending doesn't hurricane sandy prove that we need it here's an opportunity to. take this we have a stimulus every year of warden a trillion dollars in deficit spending at this point the president obama is like a doctor running a thousand votes with a patient who is not recovery yes there's an argument for spending more to help the people who were damaged when the federal weather service didn't warn them about the incoming storm but the larger point is this country has been following that policy for so long that we are near because if we didn't come you know didn't warn them about it and the wheels are coming off because since the reagan administration we have not. spending money on infrastructure in the united states look around you most of the infrastructure was built in the fifty's sixty's seventy's and early eighty's and then we've. been spending on government run health we're going to have star wars four trillion dollars is not to blame for what's actually happening in

new york because of the storms right now and the money that it's not about actually not true part of the infrastructure is these giant dunes that they put out in front and some of this is nimby stuff because there were some neighborhoods that we don't want the stinking dunes we want to see the ocean and those are the neighborhoods ago wiped out the neighborhoods with the dunes they did get wiped out and that may be more true and i first. i but i think that with the result of what's actually happening with a lot of these people still being power out of their homes and whatever else actually i mean infrastructure in the sense that they don't have hotels there that they can put them in so they have to keep them in their homes now and that's costing a lot of money to renovate the homes more quickly than they would normally push this process along and so there's a lot of other issues at play here specifically because of the area in which it happened and that would have played all these homes had solar panels on their roofs like like about seventy percent of homes in germany do right now all these homes with solar panels they're going to be wiped off in the. sort of kind of this well bolted. in a way no matter what you say none of that makes any difference because the

environmental or the civil rights lawyers you name it lawyers there's a conflict would prevent the construction of the roads and the. berms you want for example the president believed in the two thousand and eight nine stimulus that he had lots of shovel ready construction to do it turned out you know the shovels were held back by the lawyers by the environmental reviews so if you will so if you want to have these good old fashioned construction manufacturing jobs you're gonna have to roll and fire a whole pile of post-graduate lawyers civil rights guys because i'm with you neil munro francesca chambers thank you both for being with us the higher the waters show. first kill all the lawyers. i realize. it was me coming up as gun control becomes such a touchy and heated issue in america that the word gun itself deserves a place in george carlin's famous seven dirty words sketch.

sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is. welcome to the big picture. it's.